lordargent:However, the research is still at an early stage and researchers say it will be at least a decade before people can 'grow their own teeth'.

It's about damn time, dental tech is so stuck in the stone age as far as tech is concerned.

We sent people to the moon, we have nuclear weapons, but we're still yanking out teeth and sticking titanium cores into the jawbone and mounting fake resin teeth on top.

Its not always the teeth. My teeth were perfectly healthy, never had a cavity in 41 yrs. No root canals, nothing other than cleanings, braces, and lots of periodontal probing and under the gum work. I still had my wisdom teeth. They came in fine but all my molars leaned forward at a 45 deg angle with curved roots. My jawbones were deteriorating from genetics, bad orthodontia, clenching my jaw in my sleep/grinding teeth, and probably years of smoking. I had to choose between painful, expensive, and extended recoveries doing bone grafts over several years and just pulling them all and going with dentures and then to MDIs in a few years.

Sucks to have no natural teeth now, but my jaw, head, and whole body feel so much better. Now that I think about, today is my one year mark.

Maybe they can grow me some new jawbone and then slap in some new chompers.

Calehedron: pulling them all and going with dentures and then to MDIs in a few years.

That's what I'm saying though, it's dentures or implants.

/I chip teeth because in my culture, we use our teeth for things we probably shouldn't have (like cracking open hazelnuts).

/lost a pair of teeth to bone fragment that was hiding in some delicious BBQ ribs. Got root canals and crowns on both teeth. I wish I could have just extracted them and plugged some brand new teeth into the holes (or even better, just grow new teeth right there on the site). Sadly, dental technology had not quite caught up to my desires.

/meanwhile, when I cut off the very tip of my thumb, they were able to grow it back That part is still a little sensitive, but it looks like an ordinary part of the thumb, and it beats having a flat thumb.

lordargent:I wish I could have just extracted them and plugged some brand new teeth into the holes (or even better, just grow new teeth right there on the site). Sadly, dental technology had not quite caught up to my desires.

I am not a dentist, but I seem to remember that one of the problems with trying to regrow any sort of mammalian teeth is that they fit together so tightly that it's nearly impossible to replace one without replacing the entire set. By contrast, a reptile can lose and regrow any of its teeth at any time during its liftspan, but the tradeoff is that they can't chew their food, and as a result they can't digest it as efficiently.